Improved screenshot maker

[blue334]

It would be nice if the quality of screenshots could be tweaked. The jpg-compression is currently too high for my taste, as demonstrated by the comparison below. Maybe three different quality settings, low, medium, high. I would regard the current compression level as "low".

Frame in Virtualdub vs screenshot fetched by PVD (bottom), both frames zoomed 200%.


While I'm at it, there is still room for improvement of the automatic screenshot maker. It fails to create proper screenshots for a lot of movies, not limited to the matroska files. A common error seems to be that all frames are grabbed from the first few seconds of the movie, regardless of setting to "fixed interval" or "random frames". Sometimes they are all grey, and sometimes the scanner just fails to create any (ffmpeg often crashes in those cases). The basic functionality seems to be in place however, I can easily create proper screens for problem files using the manual scanner.

Typical bad screenshot result:

[AimHere]

Hi,

While I can understand the desire to have PVD do everything, I found an excellent standalone video screenshot/thumbnails maker, called, surprisingly enough, "Video Thumbnails Maker".

http://www.suu-design.com/projects.html

Give this a try if PVD's screenshots aren't to your liking...

Aimhere

[rick.ca]

Thanks for the recommendation, Aimhere. I don't see any difference in quality, but it seems very efficient and includes some nice features.

Hopefully, there will be some improvements in the PVD screen shot maker. It's the best option for automatically grabbing some screen shots.

[blue334]

I recommend updating the bundled (and seemingly very old) ffmpeg.exe for proper matroska/x264 support. The successrate of the automatic screenshot maker appears to have improved from around 50% (on mkv/matroska files encoded with x264) to 100% after I replaced the bundled ffmpeg.exe with the latest available build.


http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ffmpeg